Buy The Stars
by BookSlut1994
Summary: Gilbert loves Roderich. Roderich loves Gilbert. In another time, another place, another life, they could've been happy. They are fourteen and it's Berlin in 1934, and they never had a chance. /It's a trainwreck in excruciating slow motion, and tragedy isn't romantic, it's just tragic/ Adopted with permission from the original author. Warnings by chapter
1. Prologue

A/N: The writing in this chapter is a bit odd and disjointed, as Gilbert is dying and his mental state is *not awesome* to put it mildly. Future chapters will be more comprehensible and should be forthcoming soon.

Reviews are love! Please, please let me know how you feel :)  
3 3 BookSlut1994

 **Warnings:** **Hints at body horror, violence, gore, suicidal ideation, allusions to Nazi human experimentation, Nazi-ism in general, period/ideology-typical racism, references to genocide, references to drug and alcohol abuse as a coping mechanism, justifiable guilt, major character death, mercy killing, dark, incomprehensible nonsense, general mindfuckery.**

-Prologue-

Some Indeterminate Date in 1945

"Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never beautiful. It was just red."

-Kait Rokowski

Pain- it's all Gilbert knows. He's floating; he's falling. He hears a scream that might or might not be his. His face is wet; with blood, with tears? Who knows?

 _I'm going to die._

It's not so much a thought as a feeling, a creeping sense of horror that's beginning to seem more and more like relief as the dayshoursweeksmonths (Not years- no one lives that long here) tick by, stretching, condensing, spiraling on and onandonandon in an endless succession of light- sterile, too-bright white, dark-black, endless, the depths of hell, slamming doors, and agonizing pain. Gilbert's learned to fear the sound of jackboots on concrete, to cringe at the _scritch, scratch_ of a pen.

There's a loud scraping sound, an industrial door sliding across concrete. Gilbert flutters his eyelids open, but it's dark.

 _It's always dark now._

 _The doctor's voice is smug,_

 _"_ _Such pretty, red eyes…"_

 _Then, PAIN._

There's the sound of boots- soldiers.

 _They used to be my friends_

 _-they were_ **_never_** _myfriends._

Maybe they've come to kill him. His breath rattles in his chest; shouldn't sound like that, isn't good-isn't right. Gilbert should run, fight, escape, do somethinganything. The door is open, he can feel it- unstale, hallway air, if he can reach it… He can't. He _can't_ and this is a nightmare. He lays his cheek against the ground and waits.

Voices, not German, Russian- _kommunisten._ Gilbert's heard what they do to people like him- good German citizens, no- not like him, he's bad, awful, the worst. He's killed so many people.

 _"_ _How many times do I have to tell you, Gil they're not people, not really."_

 _Glass rains from the sky like falling stars_

 _I wish you were my parents_

 _He kneels in the street, throws up._

 _Blood splatters his face, the grass is red, the flag is red, his hands are red_

 _Gilbert hates the color red_

 _Austria has joined the Reich- Sieg Heil Viktoria_

 _No, no, no this is a nightmare, it has to be a nightmare_

 _"_ _Guess what we learned is school today, bruder!"_

 _"_ _I hear Paris in the springtime is lovely."_

 _He smokes, he drinks, he fucks, he pops pill after pill after pill_

 _In his dreams, Roderich is alive, in his dreams, Roderich is somewhere nice_

He gasps. A boot? Feels like a boot collides with his side, rearranges the broken mess that used to be his ribs. The sound that he makes is strangled, and something less than human- the irony is not lost on Gilbert. Someone tugs at his jacket, bending his limp arm the wrong way with it. He's too weak to protest, too weak to cry. Somewhere, someone vomits- it's not him.

A cold voice, deep, heavily accented German, like they think he can hear them. A finger strokes his face, cuts a trail through the congealed blood and grime.

"An officer…" the voice croons, sounds darkly delighted, "fascist pigs- to do this to one of their own?" He cups Gilbert's chin in his hand, "what did you do, little fascist- to be so bad even your own couldn't stand it? Or are you a traitor?"

A traitor- they could say that.

 _Roderich's face, tear-streaked, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass_

 _"_ _You goddamned_ _ **traitor**_ _, they loved you like a son."_

Molten liquid drips from the spot where his eyes -used- to be, burns his face like acid. He's sorry- so fucking sorry, and he deserves this, deserves all of it- more, for all the things he's done. He takes another rasping breath and he's dying- just not fast.

"Toris, come." There's a nervous shifting of feet, fingers scrabble at Gilbert's neck, smaller, slimmer than the other man's searching desperately for a pulse. "Ivan, he's alive."

"Tch. Barely. Disgusting, and they call _us_ inhumane."

Gilbert's pulse is sluggish, his breaths like knives. He clings to this life stubbornly by a thread, his body betraying his soul's cries for oblivion. He can't move, can barely breathe. All he can do is lie here and wait for death.

"Poor bastard."

There's the telltale _click_ of a gun loading. Bang. Pain, sharp, distracting. Then, _blackness._ Gilbert closes his eyes, falls into the void, and _remembers…_


	2. Chapter 2

-The Beginning-

Gilbert

Infernally Haunting Reality

1920s

Note: Chapter title was pulled from this really interesting article I read while researching Weimar-era Berlin. You can read it here: .

If Gilbert closes his eyes and lets himself fall down, down, down into the past, he can arrive at a time before all this- a time when he was a person and not a monster. Gilbert's earliest memories are a wound healed wrong. Hazy in the way that early childhood memories generally are, they hurt him in a place he can't seem to locate, in ways he doesn't fully understand and can't quite articulate. The happy ones hurt as much as the sad ones, maybe more; the brief, golden moments serving merely to highlight the darkness. It's this, the happiness just slightly out of reach that will crush his tiny child heart into powder; the one word playing on repeat in his mind- the saddest question of them all…

 _Why?_

To tell a story right, you have to go all the way back to the beginning, _once upon a time._ It's too easy to think that bad things happen because the people who do them are evil, that they enjoy pain and destruction- get some sick pleasure from it that the rest of us don't. It's easy to think this; it's easy and it feels good to cast atrocities as anomalies and those who commit them as monsters, because if you believe that, you can believe that they're not like you. That in the same situation, you wouldn't make the same awful choices- and maybe you're right. Maybe you wouldn't, but the truth is, you never really know. It's this nagging uncertainty that tugs at your precious fucking heart and threatens to rip it into a thousand bloody pieces. So you whisper to yourself, "I'd never do that," the lie you tell yourself so you can sleep at night. The truth is, all monsters are human, like you are; like I am.

 _And monsters aren't born, lovely. They're_ _ **made.**_

Berlin in 1923 is a filthy sort of lovely; a lush, noirish fairieland that exists in the liminal zone between prosperity and destitution, the sulking girl at the edge of the party that is postwar Europe. In the daytime, the rich take to the newly-built autobahn in long, shiny cars built to go _fast, fast, fast-_ fast enough that they can pretend not to see the weary, coal-covered workers, the harried mothers flinging handfuls of nearly worthless _deutschemarks_ onto the counters of shopkeepers, "Is _this_ enough for you, _saukerl?_ ". When night falls, velvety, expansive, darker than black, hungry-eyed shopgirls spill from run-down apartments in beaded dresses and fake gems- all bought on credit- to dance the night away in smoky, sparkling clubs. Maybe they'll meet their nouveau-riche prince charming there; maybe, but probably not. It doesn't matter. Tomorrow they'll rise to do it all again. So Berlin in 1923 isn't one city, it's two, superimposed upon each other- shiny and shadowy, the glitz ever-tainted by coal-dust, the glass of gin that's guaranteed to precede a hangover, and at the edges of this glittering metropolis- away from the decadence and the modern art and the intellectualism, there are whispers of discontent, the proverbial witch at the heart of the forest.

 _When she offers you an apple, don't bite._

 _(This time the witch is a man)_

Johanna Beilschmidt is a wild, beautiful, rageful creature- the kind of woman men write songs and poetry about; the kind smart men don't marry. Gilbert's memories of his mother are mostly of her on her way out the door. Even in his childhood memories, Gilbert's hands are red, red from trying to hang on, from being slammed in the door when he's fast, but not fast enough- left behind again.

 _It's not blood, but the sight still horrifies him._

 _(Gilbert hates the color red)_

Johanna is a shooting star, bright, brilliant, gone in an instant.

"Are you coming back, Mutti?"

"Of course, liebling. Mutti always comes back."

She always comes back until she doesn't. She's like a shooting star; beautiful, cold, speeding through space, perpetually out of reach. When Gilbert is in first grade, his teacher tells him that shooting stars aren't stars at all. They're rocks that look like stars. It's so fitting that he starts to cry; right there in the middle of class. And when he gets pulled into the corridor, because he punched Freddie Schmieder, because Freddie called him crybaby, and the teacher asks what's wrong, he says "Nothing." Because _my Mutti is a dead, cold rock_ sounds crazy; because _my Mutti is a lying, selfish whore and she isn't coming back_ hurts too much and he doesn't have the vocabulary to say it anyway. He says "Nothing" and the teacher sighs, shakes her head and slaps his knuckles with her ruler. Gilbert grits his teeth and watches in miserable resignation as his hands go from white to pink to red.

He hangs his head as he slinks back into the classroom, trying to swallow down the miserable tears that he _doesn't want_ and can't yet control.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing." (everything.)

When Gilbert gets home, he hides in the broom closet and screams until his esophagus is raw.


	3. Chapter 3

-The Beginning-

Roderich

(We are All in the Gutter, but) Some of Us are Looking at the Stars

1945/1920s

Note: I know they usually refer to Hungary as Elizaveta/Elizabeta, but for the purposes of cultural authenticity, I'm using the actual Hungarian version, which would be Erzsébet (or Erzsa for short, although that is probably not the correct nickname. There are limits to my patience for research so….). I'm not quite committed enough to fanfiction to go research what being on speed feels like, so the /brief/ mentions of that in this chapter are entirely fictional and loosely based on times I've consumed upwards of 6 cups of coffee during finals week. Stay off drugs, kids!

 _"_ _Do you think? Do you think-"_

 _"_ _Is he awake?"_

 _"_ _Will he live?"_

 _"_ _That Nazi_ _ **fuck-**_ _"_

 _"_ _-think there's blood on my pumps."_

Roderich wakes to the smell of gunpowder and gasoline, fragments of half-remembered conversation slipping through his blitzed-out brain like sand in an hourglass. His heart is still beating too fast- a frantic rhythm that makes his veins feel too tight and his chest hurt. Despite the heaviness of his exhaustion, he doubts he'll be able to force himself back to sleep, not like this with his mind flickering between diamond-sharpness and swirling oblivion. He's curled up on some sort of bench, and the cracked leather of it scrapes painfully against his bruised cheekbone as the surface below him rumbles and jolts along. When the … _car?_ Roderich decides that he's in a car, because unsure of what else this could be, takes an especially rough turn, there's a feminine shout and someone else starts cursing rapidly in what he's certain is Polish, although his grasp of the language is shaky at best.

 _A rescue then?_ Roderich daren't hope- it _does things to people._ He tries to lift his chest off of the seat, but makes it scarcely an inch before the excruciating pain forces him back down. He manages to swallow a cry because he's _good_ at dealing with pain- he's had to be, but he can't help the tears that prick at the edge of his eyes as his ribs meet the bench again- harder than he'd like; it _hurts._ He takes a breath and that hurts too.

"Shh, stop moving, you'll hurt yourself." The woman speaks again, shifts in the passenger seat and reaches back until her pale fingers are touching the edge of the back seat, and Roderich would know that voice anywhere- those green eyes, and that insane, untamable mass of hair.

" 'rsza?" Roderich tries to make himself speak, but his tongue feels heavy in his mouth- thick and dry and fuzzy, and the words won't form. He's _so tired_.

 _"_ _Shhh…"_ Erzsa is crying now, and all Roderich can do is stare, because Erzsébet Hedervary _does not cry_ , hasn't in all the years he's known her- in all the years she's been his _wife._ "You're safe now."

 _Safe._

Roderich closes his eyes and falls into a sea of stars; they surround him, close, and sparkling and warm, enveloping him in soft, golden light, bearing him gently back into the past.

In Roderich's oldest memories- the happy ones, before his life was destroyed in an explosion of shattered glass and black smoke- he is looking at the stars. He remembers being tiny, sitting on a balcony at his grandfather's house in Vienna, wrapped in a quilt that smells like old books and Chanel No. 5, curling his fingers around the intricately twisted iron bands of the railing while his grandfather runs his fingers through his hair and spins stories of gods and heroes and ancestors as numerous as the stars. Roderich giggles and stretches his hands to the sky, certain that if he reaches hard enough, he can touch them. On nights like this, he feels like he could live forever- high on music and starlight and the warmth of childhood. He doesn't hear his father's whispered admonishments that his son is too old for faerie tales.

When Roderich is in first grade, he learns that stars aren't dead people at all- they're giant balls of gas, and he didn't _really_ believe that but hearing it announced so casually still feels like losing something and when one of his classmates- _Gilbert_ starts sobbing, Roderich doesn't blame him at all. He wants to cry too.


	4. Chapter 4

-1-

I Wish I May

Roderich and Gilbert

1929

A/N: HOLY SHITTT, Children- It's an update! (Sometimes I do useful things).

Thanks for bearing with my indolence,

BookSlut1994!

Warnings for brief references to suicide, child abuse/neglect/abandonment, bullying, period-typical antisemitism, scapegoating, general historical nastiness, also my shit use of punctuation.

 **"** **There is a cruelty in a wish that comes true. It is weighed, it is measured, it is absolute. No less than the words that invoked it, but no more, either.**

 **This is the first thing she learned: Just because someone can love you doesn't mean they will. This is the second: It is worse to know that someone can love you, and that they have chosen not to."**

 **-Kat Howard,** ** _Roses and Rot_**

The day Gilbert Beilschmidt meets Roderich Edelstein, _really meets him_ , they are both nine years old and the ache of sheer, utter loneliness is crushing; they're constantly reaching, reaching, grasping at starlight, ephemeral and fleeting, hoping, hoping for something better than _this._ When their bodies collide on a cold, rainy day in December, like their lonely-boy souls can sense each other, it's the beginning- the beginning and the end of everything. They are destined and they are doomed. Poor boys. Poor children.

 _I wish I may_

1929 is hard- when the bright, roaring cash-cold stock market fails, it _crashes_ \- sparks and explodes like a supernova, apocalyptic in its burnt-out brilliance. Printing presses bleed ink like tears, and Bright Young Things fall from half-built skyscrapers like dead leaves. Gatsby's green light is extinguished forever- maybe it never _was_ , its beguiling gleam a side-effect of the gin, a distant figment of the fever-dream, and when the world wakes up, they're crawling in the same ashes that've been blowing about the edges of their paradise since the end of the war. The stocks fall, then the banks fail, then the Americans stop lending money for the reparations payments.

 _"_ _So sorry- you know how it is."_

 _How it_ _ **is**_

 _It_ has been this way forever- for too goddamned long, and the whispers grow louder… _When the woodcutter ran out of money, he sent his children into the heart of the forest. The witch, she was waiting with a house made of marzipan- marzipan and blood._ German faerie-tales are dark, and scared people are quick to reach for someone to blame. The whispers grow ever-louder- on the radio, in the news, "Be afraid. Be _very afraid._ You should be, because of THESE PEOPLE." Spin-doctors, witch-doctors sew terror behind citizen's eyes and reflect it back with their magic mirrors:

"Be afraid. Be _very afraid."_

 _"_ _Don't be afraid. It's not serious- not like last time, not like EnglandSpainFranceRussiaEverytimeEverywhere."_

It's 1929 and stars are balls of gas and gods and ancestors and pretty, pretty candles are for Grandfather and the Hermanns down the street and stupid people, and Herr Professor Edelstein and his family are _fine_ because it's almost 1930, not 1800s Russia and they're not _those sorts of people_ anyway- they're not any sort of religious. They have nothingtofear-nothingtohide. Roderich goes to school; he comes home from school; he talks to no one and no one talks to him; he practices piano and goes to the library- comes home with as many books as his skinny child-arms can carry. He misses his friends in Vienna. He misses his grandparents. In one of his books, the hero wishes on a star and all his dreams come true. When he gets home, he leans out his bedroom window and stares at the sky- the stars are high and cold and the snow falls in heavy torrents, whipping against his face in icy pellets. He screws his eyes shut and makes a wish.

 _Dear stars, please, I would like a friend-_

 _Just one._

It's 1929 and being abandoned once could be passes off as a mistake, but twice is _betrayal_. He sits on the scuffed, dark floor of the foyer and stares at the small, screaming mass that is Ludwig- his _brother_. Tentatively he reaches out and pets its soft, yellow hair. She didn't want it either.

 _"_ _Bitch,"_ he whispers. He has the vocabulary now, and orphans grow up fast- they raise each other. The nuns would smack him six ways to Sunday if they heard him, but they don't hear or don't care. A lump rises in his throat and Gilbert bites his lower lip until his mouth tastes like dirty copper. The baby keeps screaming.

 _"_ _Stop crying,"_ he mutters, unsure if he's talking to the baby or himself. His face stings. He'd really believed that she'd come back- she'd said she would. It's only now that Gilbert realizes his mother had never promised to stay.

 _I wish I may_

He curls up in the hallway and cries with his brother until they both pass out from exhaustion. When he awakes to sickly winter sunlight and an aching back from sleeping on the floor, he's hit with another wave of disappointment- like a slap in the face. It never ends, _it never ends._ It's the last straw, and that day, Gilbert resolves to run away. Anywhere is better than here.

In 1929, Roderich sits in a classroom and chews on the end of a pencil, bored, bored, bored. The teacher drones on about their country's illustrious history, and he can't find it in himself to care until Franz Schumacher pulls his hair and whispers something _vicious_ \- it's not the first time Roderich's been harassed, but it's the first time anyone's ever hurt him. He yelps but the teacher doesn't look up from her book. She doesn't hear him, Roderich decides. The desk in front of him is empty- it's been empty for a week. Roderich tips his head back and stares at the ceiling- he's _bored._

When he gets home from school, Roderich nearly trips over a newspaper and reads the headline: _Boy, 9 and Baby- Missing from Local Orphanage. Police Suspect Kidnapping_. It's the kid from his class. Roderich didn't know that he had a brother. He grabs a stack of sheet music and goes to the piano room. The music is almost loud enough to drown out the frantic tone of his mother's phone call to his Aunt in Hungary.

"Yes, yes. We're fine. Yes, I heard… No, you're right- it's terrible… Well, no one _really_ thinks that. No, _no_ … I mean we're not _really_ Jewish anyway."

When she finally comes downstairs and asks about his day, Roderich leaves out the part about Franz- it doesn't matter. He's fine. The relief on her face when she smiles and ruffles his hair is unsettling.

Cold rain falls in an icy sheet from a flat, grey sky; two German orphans huddle in the shadow of a university library- one golden as the sun, and the other the color of snow and blood, and it's like a faerie-tale, but we forget that the old faerie tales are Dickensian and horrific. The older one- the one clutching the baby- wiggles his toes to keep from freezing and takes a step forward, back out among the rows of imposing buildings. He squares his shoulders against the chill and the terror and starts running, lost, lost, lost- here there be monsters. He's been wandering for days, he thinks, or months, or years- he doesn't know. He's _so hungry_ , and at least Hansel and Gretel had breadcrumbs. He doesn't even have that. He can't take care of a baby, and they might die here. The thought terrifies him and he keeps running, because he might not know where he's going, but the chill is vicious and it's run or freeze and maybe the stories are true and all roads lead home.  
 _Maybe the stories are true and bad children get eaten by wolves_

He bumps headlong into another human and they crash into the ground. Gilbert screams, terrified, but then he looks up and sees that it's another boy- around his age. The other boy blinks and hands back the baby- which miraculously fell on him and not the street.

"Hello," he smiles politely, "I'm Roderich. You dropped your baby. You're lost. Did you know?"

Gilbert stands there in shocked silence for what feels like a full minute before he reaches out his hands and takes back his brother. "I'm Gilbert, but you can call me Gil."

"I know." Roderich sniffs condescendingly. With his coffee-dark curls and violet eyes, he looks like a prince from a renaissance painting. "You're lost. Where's your coat?"

"Don't have one," Gilbert admits. He hadn't thought he'd need one. He hadn't anticipated getting _lost_. "Where's your parents?" he counters.

"Vati is working. He's a _professor._ " He sticks out his chin and there it is again- that tone of smug condescension. Maybe that's just how Roderich sounds. "Where are yours?"

Gilbert's stomach twists. "Don't have'em."

"Oh." The other boy stares at the pavement. "I am very sorry for your loss." He takes off his coat and tosses it at Gilbert. His aim is _terrible._ "You should put that on your baby."

Gilbert takes the proffered object. "It's not my baby," he says, just to be difficult. "Boys can't have babies."

"It's a baby. You're holding it- that makes it yours." The other boy rolls his eyes.

"I guess."

"You should come home with me. We're having strudel tonight."

Gilbert smiles. "Strudel is _awesome."  
_ Roderich giggles and takes his hand- the beginning of everything. The end of everything.

Poor boys; poor children. Destined and doomed.

 _I wish I may_


End file.
